An NSA whistleblower comes forward with fresh allegations about NSA …

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As the credits roll on the Bush administration, a former NSA analyst who helped blow the whistle on the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program in 2005 has come forward again with allegations that the agency deliberately targeted and intercepted the communications of American journalists. He also described the data mining program, first revealed in 2006, used to target suspicious communications by filtering the metadata of all communications, foreign and domestic, passing over US wires.

In an interview with MSNBC's Keith Olberman, Russell Tice, who was fired by the NSA in May of 2005, explained that he had been tasked with monitoring the communications of specific groups, which he described as an attempt "to try to harpoon fish from an airplane," which he contrasted with the "collecting all the fish" approach of data miners. Among those targeted, said Tice, were American reporters and news agencies. "We looked at organizations supposedly so we would not target them," Tice explained. "What I was finding out was that the collection on those organizations was 24/7, 365 days a year. It made no sense. I started to investigate that; that's about the time they came after me to fire me."

He also spoke of a data mining program with which he was not directly involved—presumably the same component of the extrajudicial Stellar Wind surveillance that provoked a near mutiny at the Justice Department in 2004. "The NSA had access to all Americans' communications: faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," said Tice. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas in the middle of the country and you never made any foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications." According to Tice, NSA computers would "look at the metadata, the signaling data for communications, and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected." As one example of the type of patterns that might flag someone as suspect, Tice offered the example of a series of very short telephone communications.

It's unclear what process was followed once communications were selected for further scrutiny. We do, however, know that judges on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at some point became dismayed that information gleaned from Stellar Wind intercepts was being laundered through their court—one is believed to have resigned over the matter. It seems probable that the analysis of communications metadata was later used as the basis for formal FISA warrants.

Tice also complained that administration officials would "tailor their briefings to try to be deceptive" when dealing with legislative oversight committees. For instance, if responsibility for a particular surveillance program was divided between the Department of Defense and an intelligence agency, they might claim to each relevant committee that it fell within the jurisdiction of the other, in what Tice characterized as a "shell game."

The Supreme Court has ruled that the collection of communications metadata—such as the numbers dialed from a particular phone, the times at which calls were made, or e-mail routing and addressing information—does not trigger the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. However, both Title III, which covers domestic criminal wiretaps, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act require a court order before such information can be obtained.

I first interviewed Tice in 2006, when he described in "hypothetical" terms the surveillance capabilities of the NSA. At the time, Tice explained:

If you wanted to, you could suck in an awful lot of information. The biggest constraint you're going to have is the computing power you need to do it. You need to have some huge computers to crunch that kind of stuff. More than likely you're talking about picking it up in a digital format and analyzing it depending on how the program is written depending on whether it's audio or digital recognition you're talking about, the computing power is phenomenal for that sort of thing. Especially if you're talking about mass volumes, if you're talking about hundreds of thousands of, say, telephone communications or something like that, calls of people just like you and me, like we're talking now.

Then you have things like, and this is where language specialists come in, linguists who specialize in things like accents and inflections and speech patterns and all those things that come into play. Or looking for key phrases or combinations of key words within a block of speech. It becomes, when you add in all the variables, astronomical.

When I contacted Tice in late 2007, hoping to conduct a follow-up interview, he informed me that he had decided not to speak further with the press on advice of his attorney, though he did testify before Congress in closed hearings. "This may," he added, "change a little more than thirteen months from now." Apparently it has.